Information & Ethics committee  Let me start out with our own privacy practices. We are always interested in striving to continuously improve and enhance in areas where we can. I will say I am quite comfortable and proud of all of the work we have done to ensure privacy at BlueDot, starting with only working w

Information & Ethics committee  I think it was actually quite helpful. As I was describing earlier, the counterfactual, or how this would have played out in the absence of these types of data, would have been trying to catch up after we saw that cases were surging in a particular area. This is a leading indicat

Information & Ethics committee  I will start. Alex, feel free if you would like to add your thoughts. The metaphor I might use is that it provides some timely insights in a rapidly evolving outbreak. The metaphor of not having that information in those types of insights is a bit like fighting an outbreak but w

Information & Ethics committee  The question is about data. Do you mean data in general or...?

Information & Ethics committee  I would say that for mobility data—and I'd have to look up that number—it's probably most of the world in some form. Obviously there are certain areas where there may be more devices and more data. We are looking at global airline and transportation data across the entire planet,

Information & Ethics committee  Alex, did you want to take this one? Mr. Chair, neither of us is the technical leader. We have our head of technology. Everything that we have is managed in highly secure cloud environments. We have full levels of encryption. We work with independent third parties to enhance ou

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, I think I'll try to take that. Certainly, any of the data we are working with is de-identified. It is not associated with any information about names, addresses, occupations, nationality or any data of that sort. In relation to the work we have done with population

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question, and apologies for my perhaps suboptimal mike. I hope you can all hear me okay. This is certainly a broader question and an important question. I will say that we really believe that our purpose—this is what I can speak to—is a noble purpose. We are us

Information & Ethics committee  I do think there are concerning uses of data in some forms that can influence behaviour and certainly can have negative social impacts. I would agree with that statement. As to my personal feeling, I don't believe that the work we're doing falls into that particular domain. Howe

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, perhaps I'll try to take that question. It's a big one. It's an important question. The identification of individuals and personal information obviously requires a different level of consent. Drawing from my own experience with informed consent, when I'm talking to a

Information & Ethics committee  We are not a mobile device location data business. We are simply an infectious disease insights business. I believe that RFP was more oriented towards cell tower based data.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, I'm happy to take that question. This, I think, comes back to the fact that BlueDot is an infectious disease insights organization. The work we're doing with mobile data is just one small piece in what we do. What we have developed is a platform that is monitoring on

Information & Ethics committee  Do you want to take that one?

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. Over the course of the relationship with the Public Health Agency, the issue of privacy did come up on many occasions. We had that conversation directly with the Public Health Agency about procedures and how we were working with the data and so forth.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd have to go back to our specific agreements and contracts. Our work with the Public Health Agency of Canada was largely for the agency to be able to support local, national and provincial...and these types of decisions across the country. To my knowledge, I'm not entirely aw